Establishing Partnerships For Community-Engaged Learning: A Guiding Rubric For Collaborating Organizations

The Partnership for Student Success understands and interprets Community-Engaged Learning (CEL) as a powerful framework that calls for community service opportunities offered by higher education institutions, nonprofit organizations, and school districts to be truly engaged with both the needs of the community and the academic or career growth of the students, volunteers, and employees providing the service. In this context, CEL is more than placement, volunteering, or program support. It involves a partnership-based approach that intentionally connects service with learning, reflection, reciprocal collaboration, sustained relationships, mutual understanding, and meaningful public impact. The goal is to create experiences that benefit P-12 learners, service agents, partner organizations, and the broader communities connected to the work.

This tool, the Community-Engaged Learning Partnership Rubric, was created by the Partnership for Student Success (PSS), in an effort to support higher education institutions, nonprofit organizations, and school districts aiming to align their tutoring, mentoring, postsecondary transition coaching, student success coaching, and wraparound support coordination programs with the principles of CEL as interpreted by the PSS.

The CEL Partnership Rubric is part evaluative, and part developmental. Its evaluative components pose questions about the current state of a partnership and its program(s), and examine how key practices related to each CEL Element are implemented. Its developmental components invite self-reflection, dialogue among partners, and new lines of thinking.